Writing on operations software, institutional design, the unfashionable parts of the stack, and what we're learning building things that have to last. New posts roughly fortnightly.
A complete map of UK property compliance — gas, electrical, EPC, fire risk, quinquennial inspections and the Renters' Rights changes — with in-depth guides for each cycle and how to track them per property.
A practical buyer's checklist for diocesan management software — data model, property and people on one record, compliance cycles, a parish portal, reporting and migration.
A complete guide to moving an organisation off spreadsheets — why the estate fails, what it really costs, how to fix the reporting, and how to migrate without the team reverting.
How a diocese can track quinquennial inspection (QI) cycles across every church building — inspector appointments, next-due dates, schedules of works and escalation — without losing one to a spreadsheet gap.
How a diocese can manage glebe land and parsonage housing on one live property terrier — leases, rent reviews, compliance cycles and vacancies — instead of across spreadsheets that drift.
How a diocese can run the faculty jurisdiction and DAC process as tracked cases against each church — stages, owners, notice periods and completion records — instead of stalled email threads.
Why parish share and parish returns leak accuracy when they run on emailed spreadsheets — and how a parish portal feeding one shared record fixes the re-keying, the share calculation and the chase.
A candid comparison of running a diocese on spreadsheets versus a diocesan management system — deadlines, relationships, audit, reporting and the real hidden costs, with a clear table.
How property management for a Catholic diocese differs from the Church of England — trustee structure, presbyteries, schools and charity governance — and what stays exactly the same.
A common question, increasingly. Can we replace our data analyst with AI now? Some of what they do, yes. Most of what they actually did for you, no. And the bits AI does cheaply were not the bits you were paying them for.
The technical migration is the easy half. The harder half is what happens to the people. A practical guide to the rollout, in the order it tends to bite, with the three signs it has actually landed.
Every internal process has at least one step that survives only by habit. The audit that finds them, and the discipline that turns customisation into ongoing efficiency rather than ongoing drag.
Typing the same fact into three systems is the clearest sign that you do not have a central record. The four costs, where the habit comes from, and how to retire it in priority order.
Two systems return different answers to the same question. There are only three reasons that happens, and only one of them is a data problem. The investigation, in order.
Every team that has invested in a proper system also has a shadow spreadsheet. The four reasons they appear, what each one is telling you, and how to absorb them without insulting the team.
The CSV export button is the single most common sign that a team's reporting needs have never been articulated. The interview that replaces it, and the three exports worth keeping.
AI has made a senior engineer two-to-four times faster at building. It has not made anyone faster at supporting what gets built. What changes when development outpaces support.
Single source of truth is easy to agree with and hard to implement. A practical guide to the ownership map, the conversation it forces, and what changes when it is in place.
A house under a tenancy in 2026 sits inside eight separate compliance cycles. Here is the actual list, with cadence and what fails when one slips.
CP12 basics, the failure codes that catch landlords out, and the chain of evidence the tribunal will want to see.
A practical, low-risk guide to where generative AI genuinely saves time for charities and faith-based organisations — and the four uses we tell clients to avoid.
EPCs feel like paperwork. Until one expires. Then they become the reason you cannot let, cannot evict, and cannot remortgage.
A balanced look at what Excel does brilliantly, what it does badly, and the four warning signs that you've crossed the line from "useful spreadsheet" into "fragile critical-path system you can't afford".
A worked example of where the hours go when a small team runs on spreadsheets — and why "but Excel is free" is the most expensive sentence in operations.
PAS 79, the responsible person, the post-Grenfell expectation, and what an FRA actually has to record in 2026.
Six lessons from shipping a role-scoped, audit-trailed LLM assistant inside production diocesan software — what worked, what we ripped out, and what regulated buyers actually ask about.
A practical sequence for moving from a critical spreadsheet to a proper database-backed system — with the four ways teams get this wrong, and the one rule that prevents most of them.
Periodic tenancies, decent home standard, possession grounds, the database. Five things a landlord's system needs to do that it almost certainly does not do today.
Twelve months in, here's what AI coding tools genuinely changed for our team — what got faster, what got slower, and the four anti-patterns we tell new joiners to avoid on day one.
The eight things that actually move the needle on a small business website's search ranking — and the dozen that don't. A practical, jargon-free guide.
Where does the data go, who trains on it, and what does the audit trail look like? The five questions to put to any AI vendor before you sign — and the answers that should be deal-breakers.
No-fault evictions are out. The replacement is a grounds-based possession workflow that is genuinely more administrative work, with more defensible outcomes.
A dashboard reflects whatever its query last returned. A report tells you what was true on a date. Treating them as the same thing is the most expensive reporting mistake in operations.
The creator of Node.js and Deno has been arguing that JavaScript — not Python — will be the language of AI agents. Here's the case he's making, and what it means for the businesses building with these tools today.
Most operations teams produce twenty reports nobody reads. The three that actually matter, what they should contain, and why everything else is noise.
The hidden integration tax, the data-fragmentation cost, and the point where the SaaS stack genuinely becomes more expensive than building.
The cleanest .htaccess rules for forcing your site to a single canonical hostname — www-to-non-www and non-www-to-www, with HTTPS.
Four ways to raise the PHP memory_limit setting — php.ini, .user.ini, .htaccess, and ini_set() — and how to pick the right one for your hosting setup.
Software documentation rots because nobody owns it after sign-off. Treating it as a deliverable guarantees decay; treating it as a feature is the only thing that does not.
A practical reference of the MySQL statements you'll write again and again — SELECT, JOIN, GROUP BY, indexes, and the gotchas that catch people out.
When you can't get the email reset to work, here's how to set a WordPress admin password directly in the database — and why doing it right matters.
A short, opinionated guide to installing GA4 on a UK site in 2026 — what to track, what to switch off, and what to use instead if you'd rather not.
The four ways to verify a site in Google Search Console, which one to use when, and the three reports worth checking weekly afterwards.
A clear-eyed explanation of WordPress themes — what they are, how they relate to plugins, when to buy vs build, and the four red flags that should put you off a theme.
An honest look at where WordPress still wins in 2026, where it doesn't, and the four alternatives we reach for when it's the wrong tool.
A practical guide to font sizing in modern CSS — why rem beats px, how clamp() lets you write a single fluid scale, and the type-system pattern we use on every site.
The four ways to centre an element in CSS, when to use each, and the modern one-liners that have replaced the hacks of 2014.
The right way to get a visitor's IP address in PHP when your site sits behind Cloudflare, a load balancer, or any reverse proxy — and the spoofing risks of doing it wrong.
The disavow tool is one of the most misused features in Google Search Console. Here's what it does, when it actually helps, and when you should leave it well alone.